Friday, April 23, 2010

Microsoft, continuing its strategy of opening up its products to developers who use non-Microsoft technologies, yesterday announced a software development kit to help PHP developers use SQL Server Reporting Services in Web apps.

PHP has been getting a lot of attention from Microsoft lately. Within just the last two months, the company has announced a command-line tool for PHP to deploy applications on Windows Azure, OData interoperability with PHP and guidance for using PHP with the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse plug-in.

The new SQL Server Reporting Services SDK for PHP provides a simple API to let developers list available reports and manage the rendering of reports in PHP applications, and also provide custom parameters from a PHP Web form, according to a Interoperability@Microsoft blog post.

The open-source project hosted on CodePlex works with the free SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services edition. The Business Intelligence Development Studio bundled with that free edition is used to design reports. Persistent Systems Ltd. worked on the project with Microsoft, according to the CodePlex page.

"This edition includes the SQL Server 2008 Express database engine as well as graphical administration tools and the Reporting Services server components for creating, managing, and deploying tabular, matrix, graphical, and free-form reports," according to the blog post.

Speaking to this site about MicrosoftвЂ™s increased emphasis on openness, Jean Paoli, general manager of Interoperability Strategy, said, вЂњMixed IT environments are a reality for many customers. We take a multi-faceted approach to interoperability that includes collaboration with competitors, partners and the open source community.

"We have released interoperability technical bridges for popular products including Windows Azure, SQL Server and Silverlight to connect them with various platforms, languages and tools like PHP, Java, Ruby and Eclipse,вЂќ Paoli continued. вЂњWe expect to continue adding others in line with customer demand."